HIGHLIGHTS

• Costly fines and fees for traffic citations create billions in debt for California’s drivers.
• We designed new court notices and envelopes to better highlight how to respond to a traffic citation, including the option to apply to have a fine reduced based on ability to pay.
• Improved court notices increased timely response to traffic citations by 7% and take-up of the online ability-to-pay system by 140%.

The Challenge

Fines and fees incurred in the legal system disproportionately penalize people with low incomes, saddling them with hundreds or thousands of dollars in debt they cannot afford. Often, the largest volume of fines and fees stem from traffic citations.

In California, the Judicial Council created MyCitations, a new, innovative ability-to-pay system that allows people with traffic and other infraction-level citations to request a reduced fine through an online portal. This process is convenient and quick for users and efficient for courts. However, MyCitations is only useful if drivers know about it.

To improve awareness of this new system, as well as timely responses to citation deadlines and avoidance of additional penalties, we redesigned mailed notices for one of the counties (Tulare) already using the new system. 

Our Approach

We redesigned the first two notices sent after citation—the courtesy notice and the civil assessment notice—to help people better understand their obligations, penalties for nonresponse, and ways to resolve their citation. The redesigned notices included financial hardship options such as applying for a fine reduction at MyCitations, requesting payment plans, or requesting an extension to their payment deadline. The goal of this redesign was twofold: 

1. To help more eligible people use MyCitations, and 
2. To encourage more people to respond by the deadline, whether by better understanding actions to be taken or (by knowing of these financial hardship options) feeling less overwhelmed and therefore less likely to avoid taking any action. 

Courtesy Notice

To measure the impact of redesigned court materials, we used a quasi-experimental design approach called regression discontinuity in time, whereby we compared outcomes for citations just before and after the change in redesigned court materials. 

To learn more about our approach, view the project brief.

Results

For the updated notices, our study included citations issued over almost five weeks before and nine weeks after the introduction of the new forms. Our control group consisted of 3,481 citations filed between May 3, 2022, and June 5, 2022, and our treatment group of 2,710 citations issued between June 6, 2022, and July 30, 2022.1 

For the updated envelopes, our control group consisted of 10,701 citations issued from January 1, 2023, to April 2, 2023. Our treatment group consisted of 8,805 citations issued from April 3, 2023, to June 30, 2023.

We found several key takeaways from the study, including:

• The redesigned court notices increased timely response by the deadline by 3.7 percentage points (a 7.1% increase compared to a baseline of 56% of cases). 
• Overall, fewer people (27% vs. 29%) incurred a civil assessment penalty due to the net increase in response by the first and second deadlines.
• MyCitations applications increased by 10.5 percentage points (a 140% increase from base rate of 7.5% of cases) for drivers who received the new court notices. This means that the new notices generated approximately 4,219 additional applications to MyCitations, totaling $1.3 million in new savings. 

View the project brief for more details on these results.

Takeaway

Ticketed drivers are responsive to clearer communication about how to respond to their traffic citations, and we see a substantial desire to participate in ability-to-pay adjustment programs. In Tulare County, drivers ticketed between July 1, 2022, and June 30, 2023, saved $2.2 million thanks to MyCitations reductions.

Assuming the same average adjustment as Tulare citations received in that period ($302.70), this would translate to over $147 million in total savings to California drivers over one year. While this estimate makes strong assumptions about how representative Tulare is for the state of California in terms of eligibility for MyCitations income-based adjustments, this gives us a sense of scale for total annual savings across the state. 

Beyond Tulare County, our results suggest that improving the clarity of citation notices, making the consequences of inaction explicit, and emphasizing the opportunity for fine reductions can increase response rates and improve take-up of fine reduction systems.

This work is part of (Un)warranted, an initiative to improve court appearance across the country. Through (Un)warranted, we bring our proven expertise in improving court date communications to effectively prevent nonappearance and its harmful consequences. Contact us at unwarranted@ideas42.org for questions or support in redesigning and evaluating court date forms and reminders.